Weeknotes 454

Roger on 11/04/2025

Year one

This week was my one year workiversary. It’s been a pretty amazing year of learning and planting seeds that I’ll hope to grow in my second year. But this week I:

  • Chatted about what it takes to create a high-performing team.
  • Started chatting to user-centred design people (because I’ve met all the product people).
  • Wrote up some thoughts a product strategy. I really need to find some time to blog about this.
  • Helped plan a prioritisation workshop.
  • Learned a bit more about how unit finance works.
  • Got some early feedback on my opportunities presentation. I’m looking forward to encouraging product managers to spend more time looking outside the building and discovering worthwhile problems.
  • Reflected on my first year doing product in higher education (which may become a blog post if I get the time).

The numbers

Tasks completed: 25

Minutes spent in meetings: 495

(Four day week.)

AI horizon scanner

Added more entries to my AI horizon scanner and added a Type column to make it easier to see what kind of resource it is. Still adding stuff as and when I find it and don’t yet have a system in place, so I need to figure that out, but it’s on the roadmap.

I read:

Making Better Product Decisions: Approaches and AI Prompts for Product Managers

I think critical thinking is a fundamental product skill, and good decision-making technique is built on top of that. In my experience, most product decisions aren’t made with robust logic because organisations and people are messy, but it’s still really good practice to be able to show your working out.

Sludge

“If you make things harder, I call that sludge. Kind of a fun word for stuff that’s the opposite of fun” – Richard Thaler on the Freakonomics podcast episodes about sludge, friction and administrative burden have been doing the rounds in some product circles.

Sludge, Part 1: The World Is Drowning in It

Sludge, Part 2: Is Government the Problem, or the Solution?

Trilly Chatterjee, head of product management at NHSE, has thoughts about it too.

Disruption

Doug Shapio’s talk at FutureWeek Forum is exactly the kind of analysis product manager’s should be looking at to think about how AI is going to disrupt their industry.

He talks about how the last great disruption to the media industry was the internet, which removed the distribution moat media companies used to have, and how Gen AI is the next great disruption which will remove the production moat. The disruption isn’t Hollywood using Gen AI to replace writers, it’s Gen AI replacing Hollywood.

There’s also an interesting point that if you are monetising attention and engagement, you are a media company. So does that make universities media companies? Education is more complex than entertainment, there’s more to unpack and disintermediate, because education provides knowledge, credibility, connections, etc., and arguably the institutions have far greater control over the status quo, but maybe the disruption isn’t universities using Gen AI to replace lecturers, it’s Gen AI replacing universities.

I thought:

There’s a prompt for that

Had a 5am thought about making Gen AI prompts part of documents, presentations and workshops to help people learn more about a topic. I might try it with the work I’m doing on opportunity assessment.

I haven’t tested it yet, but it would really help if a short prompt could tell the AI to go to a web page to get the full prompt. It would make for a better user experience between document and browser.

Pot holes

I vaguely remember hearing something on a podcast about using AI to improve road repairs. The point was that AI image detection can speed up identifying pot holes but that was never the slow part to fixing pot holes, it’s all other stuff of having enough budget to have enough teams with enough equipment to go out and fix the pot holes. So, yeah, it’s great that no-code and AI had a baby and now you can build a standalone application on your mobile just by sending a few chat messages. But building stuff was never the bottleneck to great products, so it’ll be interesting to see how AI changes all the other parts of product management (beyond summarising information). Maybe I should spend some time imagining that myself.